I was honored to be asked to be a panelist on the Friday, August 9th workshop of the FCC's Spectrum Policy Task Force to be held at FCC Headquarters in Washington DC. The invitation was extended as a result of my formal comments submission in the matter of FCC's Docket 02-135 in which I posit that spectrum policy decisions can be embedded into radios rather than making spectrum policy decisions in Washington DC. The overall subject of the August 9th panel (PDF link) discussion will be "Spectrum Rights and Responsibilities and I'm on the second panel discussion titled Modeling Licensed and Unlicensed Spectrum Usage Rights. To see the meeting realtime (9:00 AM - 3:00 PM Eastern) or archived, go to www.fcc.gov/realaudio.
Verizon Begins Trial Of BeamReach Networks BWIA System
Verizon has at last publicly announced the particulars for its first full set of tests for BeamReach Networks Broadband Wireless Internet Access System. Verizon has large holdings of spectrum in the 2.3 GHz Wireless Communications Service band.
Northrop Grumman Proposes To Build US Government National Broadband Wireless Network
Press Release, Infoworld Story, Wireless NewsFactor
This project, even if it isn't implemented (and it should be) is the harbinger of things to come. Flarion is one of about ten highly-promising new Broadband Wireless companies that used a "clean sheet of paper" approach to develop new wireless technologies. Such systems achieve new milestones by being inherently Near/Non-Line-Of-Sight, IP-friendly, and capable of much greater speeds than currently possible. The Flarion system, and some others, are capable of high speed communications while mobile. The proposed system would make use of spectrum reserved for US Government and be used for "Homeland Defense" activities. Once the system is operationak, it would be a showpiece for what BWIA systems are truly capable of. Once proven, the system could have the effect of kickstarting a wave of investment in equivalent private-sector Broadband Wireless systems and generate considerable spinoffs much like US Government investments in the ARPANet led to the current-day Internet. It's simply not going to be the case that we're going to achieve ubiquitous or mobile broadband services with 3G technologies as currently planned and implemented.
FSO Alliance Formally Affiliates With the Wireless Communications Association International
July 25, 2002 - The Free Space Optical (FSO) Alliance has formally agreed to permanently affiliate with the Wireless Communications Association (WCA) International. In my opinion, this is a bit overdue (the synergies were obvious to me from the formation of the FSO more than a year ago), but very welcome and a strong validation of the highly complimentary nature of "Broadband Wireless Radio Frequency" and "Broadband Wireless Optical" technologies. FSO, in my mind, is simply "Terahertz Radio Frequency" (THz RF), and as such, completely consistent with the overall mission and role of the WCA - to represent the Broadband Wireless Internet Access industry. My strongest congratulations to the leadership of both organizations for bringing this to a successful conclusion! (This is the one story that survived the Argh! because it had been copied into an email message.)
WISPCon II / WISPCon Fall 2002 Set For October 7-9, 2002
Following on a highly successful debut in March 2002, details of this Fall's "WISPCon, The Next Generation" have been finalized. Like the first event, it will be held in the Chicago, IL area, this time at the Oak Brook Hills Resort. Details are on the WISPCon II web page at www.wispcon.info. I've made the comment to the organizers that WISPCon appears to be on the same trajectory as Boardwatch Magazine's ONE BBSCon, later renamed ISPCon (now renamed... Service Networks??? Sigh...) that at its peak pretty well filled cavernous convention centers at Orlando, FL and Las Vegas' Sands Convention Center.
"802.11b+" Emerges During The Wait For 802.11g
ExtremeTech reports that Texas Instruments' "proprietary" (it was proposed, and ultimately rejected for inclusion into the 802.11g standard) Packet Binary Convolutional Coding (PBCC) Wireless Networking standard is achieving some traction in the absence of a ratified 802.11g standard. Vendors that are incorporating TI's PBCC chipset see a brief window of opportunity to exploit the lack of 802.11g devices - PBCC achieves 22 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz band and is available now. The vendors making the 802.11+ equipment simply don't see much downside; such equipment is fully 802.11b / Wi-Fi compliant and offers an optional "turbo" mode when communicating with other PBCC devices.
"Wireless Access Point Survey" - Reflections
I've read that the term "Wardriving" has developed a bad connotation (like it ever could have had a good connotation), so I've begun to use the term "survey". I had my first experience with this technique lately, and I was surprised at the results. From direct observation, Linksys is the dominant brand of home Wireless Access Point. Most home APs are set to Channel 6. Between 10 and 30% of home APs are configured to use encryption. The recent Doonesbury cartoon had it exactly right. In several instances of our experiment, we had established a ping session on my WAP and simply left it running. Twice the ping session restarted - because an AP at someone else's house I was passing had their IP defaults set the same way I had... and the pings went through OK. Scary stuff! While I'm experimenting with a high-power, wide coverage 802.11b Access Point, most of the time it's not connected to my home network for security reasons. That's not to say that I don't make use of wireless - I do indeed... but at the moment NOT 802.11b which is all-too-easily sniffed.
Ricochet Equipment Showing Up On eBay
I'm beginning to hear stories about Ricochet network equipment being put to some interesting uses. Those who are building wireless community networks are running into the gritty realities of low-power 2.4 GHz consumer-grade equipment when trying to build long-range links. Ricochet poletop nodes communicated with users on the 900 MHz band, which has far greater penetration characteristics and tends to deliver signal through trees when 2.4 GHz signals are stopped completely. A number of more progressive Amateur Radio Operators are putting Ricochet equipment to interesting uses now that it is becoming more widely available.
Update on Argh!
I was SO ticked off about losing my posting... so it took me a while to cool off to begin posting again. On further reflection, there is a way to save Radio Userland content that's in preparation, but it's certainly non-obvious. That method is to only compose paragraph-by-paragraph. After each paragraph is entered, one should do a "Post Changes". That gets the entered text onto the public web page, and after that, if Radio Userland glitches, then the text is still "safe" on the main web page and can be "copy and paste" recovered. This requres something of an adjustment for me as my writing style is iterative; I'll be writing one thing, and I'll realize I wanted to add another comment to what I previously wrote, etc. So, I have to adjust my writing style, when using Radio Userland, away from the "get it perfect before you post" mindset to more of a "revise as often as necessary" mindset. (I just about did it again; I wanted to begin entering another story, but paragraph on a different topic, but before I do I want to post what I've written so far.
Comments are always welcome!
12:10:35 PM 
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